Iain M. Banks, Matter (2008)

Or: the one about the Shellworld.

PROLOGUE

A light breeze blew. It lifted a feathery veil of dust from the plains of Barkshĭjr, and shifted a lock of hair across Adam's forehead -- or would have done, had not the passing of immemorial time erased such strands from his shining pate. Adam was the only one of his kind within several thousand light years.  Grains of dust. Galactic scales. Hop from the one to the other. I'm sure you appreciate the sudden shift in scale from the very small to the mindblowing big. Without the former you don't appreciate the latter you see.

Away, across the sodden Barkshĭjr plains, the mighty army of Bankspectations was approaching nearer and nearer.

'It'll take you hours and hours,' said the machine-lisible. 'Hours and hours and hours. 593 pages! Including a stonking great set of appendices—and an epilogue after them.'

'I know,' said Adam.

The machine-lisible looked like a scruffy compact suitcase; brown and yellow on the outside, and foxed throughout with row upon row of regimented glyphlines. It moved a little on the table, as Adam prodded it with his finger. 'Have we deployed the gratuitous sweary-words yet?'

'Fuck,' said the machine. 'No.'

'Fuck wank shittery,' said Adam, dutifully.

'Fucking pissing arse-before-cock,' agreed the machine. 'They'll soon be here.'

The onward march of the Bankspectations continued—serried ranks of proud, equine lookings-forward of wit and charm, of steel and ingenuity, entertainment and being carried away on the back of a Ripping Good Yarn. 'It has to be done,' sighed Adam.

'You'll feel worse afterwards if it isn't,' agreed the machine-isible. It tipped, as if nodding to him, and flipped open one of its rectangular covers, hard as beetle-rind. From its interior two buzzing narradrones zimmed out. The one on the left was called Surasmen, a Big Dumb Object constructed by long vanished aliens, hugely spherical and divided inwardly into 16 layers, worlds nesting within worlds, upon the skin of one of which live a varied bustling cast of Heroic Fantasy Novel characters (Mostly Horses, Armour and Swords Heroic Fantasy characters, except for the odd Steamcar. Also Flying Nazgul, not called Nazgul. Also the Horses are called Mersicors). The one on the right is a Standard Model Culture Should-They-Shouldn't-They Intervention Novel. The two narradrones strung between them a superstrong filament, constructed of Coldhardlightofdayium. In a trice, less than a trice indeed, roughly a twice-and-three-quarters, they flew over the Barkshĭjr shallow hills, zeroed-in on the mass of Bankspectations and—snickersnack!—decapitated them all.

They returned to the machine-lisible, slipped inside, and its cover snapped back (having left from the front hinge-cover they returned, naturally, via the rear one). Adam sighed again.

'Lots still there!' the machine-lisible urged him. 'Lots of stuff to admire! You gotta to admit, it held your attention as you read! Plotting, neat ideas, Big Dumb Object. What's not to like?'

'I know,' said Adam. 'And yet ...' He looked around. 'And yet ....'

APPENDIX: PLOT

There's a precis of the plot here, but its quite involved (it has to be! the novel itself is 600 pages of All Rococo All The Time plotting!) and I don't have space for that.  So, in summary: Prince Ferbin, assumed dead, secretly witnesses King Hausk assassinated by Mertis tyl Loesp, an act which puts underage Oramen lin Blisk-Jausk'r yun Pourl yun Dich (that is, Oramen-man Prince (3/2), Pourlinebrac, 8/Su) on the throne. The Oct, mentoring the Sarl, move into the ninth level of Sursamen, with the approval of the Nariscene and the more senior Morthanveld, searching the Nameless City buried beneath hundred-millions-year-old sediment under the Hyeng-zhar waterfalls. Elsewhere, Djan Seriy Anaplian, having left Sursamen to join Special Circumstances, returns. Ferbin otz Aelsh-Hausk'r flees. A human-like avatoid, Klatsli Quike recruits Anaplian; whereas Quike, a virtual of the Liveware Problem, is soon replaced by another avatoid, Pone Hippinse. Anaplian smuggles Turminder Xuss as a dildo. Anaplian is reunited with Ferbin and Choubris Holse. All descend to the ninth level, where Oramen, having survived Loesp's attempted assassination, is assassinated by a Machine of the Iln. And to think the humans had thought they were uncovering one of the Involucra! Fools! For the Iln hope to kill the Xinthian WorldGod with antimatter. Anaplian and Ferbin descend towards the WorldGod. The Liveware Problem, damaged by Nariscene weapons, is later destroyed, because the Iln commands a Morthanveld guard ship. Where is Xuss? None know where Xuss may be. Whither Xuss? Whence? Hippinse's ship destroys all but two of the Morthanveld drones. Anaplian and Ferbin, suicide-attack the Iln. Only Hose and Quike survive. And so the Shellworld is saved!

APPENDIX: NAMES

Banks does many things very well as a writer of SF. But naming is not one of those things. In Matter this manifests itself via (a) various names from the Dr Seuss Sector of the Galaxy (Terminder Xuss, the Xinth and the Xolpe); (b) names that provoke the little man in my head to start singing—the main human villain, Mertis tyl Loesp has a name just begging to be yelled by three raucous New York Jewish boys (Mer! Tis! Tyl! Brooklyn!); and there's a vanishingly minor character called Omoulldeo, a painter. Try, in company, saying his name a few times, in a deep voice. By the sixth or seventh iteration your companion will have no choice but to join in, with a falsetto 'in the jungle, the mighty jungle...' And (c), it goes without saying that one of the main characters has a name that sound like a meerkat struggling to recite the Gettysberg Address whilst being throttled to death: Ferbin otz Aelsh-Hausk'r. We expect nothing less.

APPENDIX: UNSNARK

The plot summary, above, though accurate, really doesn't capture the flavour of this novel. The experience of reading it is not one of denseness and confusion. On the contrary, compared with the later novels (earlier on this blog) Matter is a genuinely absorbing and pleasurable read. The overarching plotline is a Save The World story, but it's artfully orchestrated so that the story generates real tension; major characters drop like flies; nothing feels guaranteed. The rococo plotting, mentioned above, is twisty enough to hold a reader's interest, and the spaciousness of the whole doesn't feel baggy or diffuse in the way that, say, Hydrogen Sonata does. There are some longueurs, but overall this struck me as a very well paced adventure yarn. The worst that could be said of the core stories is that they're a little hokey (the prince watches his father the kind murdered by his uncle! He flees! The asperger's infant-king doesn't realise that his uncle the Regent is wicked!) -- but they work. And one thing this novel does really very well indeed is the focus-pull from small-scale to large, to vast, to vaster. The Big Dumb Object in this novel is full of wonder and marvel. And Banks handles his main narrative motor, the revelation of buried secret, unveiling of hidden identity etc., very nimbly.

APPENDIX: GENERAL THOUGHTS ABOUT THE CULTURE, 3

Nonetheless, there was an 'And yet ...' when I turned the final page. Not a snarky 'And yet ...' but a small-scale sense of anticlimactic 'And yet ...'. Thinking about this, I wonder if it has to do with the way the novel flirts, slightly prick-teasishly, with Banks's perennial Big Themes. Three of these in particular leapt out at me; and as I work backwards through his backlist it's dawning on me how often he comes back to them. The first isn't so much a theme as a trope, a fascination with vasty colossal massively-massive structures. Specifically he is drawn to huge bridges and huge houses. His early The Bridge (1986) uses its endless pont to brilliant metaphorical and world-building effect; and his most recent non-M novel Stonemouth (2012) opens with a Massive Great Bridge—this one at ‘an estuary town north of Aberdeen’:

I look up at the north tower of the suspension bridge, a double H shape rising another hundred metres into the murk, its grey flank stitched with little steady red lights. At the top there’s a single aircraft beacon producing sharp bursts of the blue-white light of a camera flash. The mist smears each pulse across a whole great tract of sky. [Stonemouth, 3]

His fascination with Big Bridges is a career-spanning one, evidently. Big Houses (Castles, Palaces, Orbitals etc) is perhaps more of a common feature in SF; but Banks takes it more cannily. The gigantic castle in Feersum Endjinn (1994) for instance, in which warring tribes of humans defend the vast territory of their respective rooms, pitches its conceit cleverly between grandeur and a kind of cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-in-the-Big-House hokum. The thing is, the Shellworld manages to combine both these Vast Structures in one Absolutely Humungous Spheroid. Characters explore the planet-sized rooms; and bridge from level to level, from the present to the secrets hidden in the deep past. It's all very satisfying.

The two other themes are more properly thematic. They are, first, gaming; and, two, heirarchies. The latter is the better handled of the two in this novel, I think. The Heroic Fantasy worldset enables Banks to dilate upon the injustices and unfairnesses as well as the dehumanising dangers of caste; something the architecture of his Shellworld literalises. The novel puts in play both a fairly likeable royal prince and his likeable servant; but this being a Banks novel we're not surprised that, of the two, it is the servant who survives at the end. As for gaming; I wonder if later Banks (earlier on this blog) has rather grown-out of this. In The Player of Games gaming tropes all of life. In Matter Holse has a philosophical revelation whilst playing games on board the Hence the Fortress 'to pass the time':

Life was very like a game or simulation where every possible course and outcome has already been played out, noted down and drawn up, as though on an enormous map, with the beginning of the game—before a piece has been moved or a move has been made—in the centre, and every single possible end-state arranged along the outer fringe of this implausibly stupendous chart. By this comparison, all that one does in mapping out the course of one particular game is trace a path from that central Beginning of things out through more and more branches, chances and possibilities, to one near the infinitude of Ends at the periphery. ... As Game, So Life. And indeed, As Game, So Entire History of the Whole Universe, Bar Nothing And Nobody. [Matter, 386-7]

I didn't buy this, either as a philosophical insight in its own right, or as something earned or organic to this novel. I'm not convinced 21st-century Banks really thinks Life is Exactly Like A Game. Because, you know: it isn't.

APPENDIX: EPILOGUE

'So you see,' said Adam, leaning against the kitchen door-frame, as his wife scrubbed the potatoes for supper, 'since it passed the time, during the actual reading, I was carried along. But on finishing it, the passing-the-time elements fell away and I was left feeling that the larger questions of Heirarchy (we might as well call a soil-turning-implement a soil-turning-implement: the larger questions of Class) and Gaming, aren't very insightfully handled, not to mention the ontological implications of Scale ...'

'Mmm?' said his wife.

'... which of course is simply a way in which a creative artist attempts to come to terms with the smallness and vulnerability of individual men and women, and the vastness and indifference of the cosmos as a whole, by exaggerating features from ordinary life to create hyperbolic symbols of existential mismatch between individual and unniverse. But somehow Matter doesn't properly inhabit those things.'

His wife turned her face towards him. 'What was that?' she asked. 'I wasn't really listening.'